Dear all,

 

We’d like to know how other museums are dealing with the following issue:

 

We have hundreds of thousands photos in our collections.  Over the years, several renditions of the same photo have been made (copies of the glassplates, prints, prints glued on file cards with additional information, scans of the glassplates, scans of the file cards, etc). As we have eg more than 100.000 glassplates, we need to be able to know in what box the plate of photo X is located.  The same goes for the prints, file cards, etc. 

 

We currently describe the “image” as a virtual object in TMS, but are struggling on linking the renditions to the object records:

-          We know how to create and use Media Records with several renditions (both physical and digital) and link this to a virtual object.  However it’s not possible to use the Location Authority to add a location to the physical renditions, although you can add some free text in a field like Remarks.

-          We could create an object record for each physical rendition, add a location, add digital renditions and link it to the virtual photo by adding a relationship like “… is rendition of  …” (this is what we do more or less now).

-          We could create a component for every physical rendition, add a location, add digital renditions and add it to the virtual photo

 

It’s clear that every solution listed here has some advantages but also some major disadvantages.  We are hoping to get some inspiration on this use case from other TMS users to help us solve this.

 

Kindest regards,

Dieter

 

Dieter Van Hassel

Royal Museum for Central Africa
Leuvensesteenweg 13
3080 Tervuren
Belgium

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